A Spectacle by Design: A Racialized Performance for Donor Dollars

Utilizing critical and participatory ethnography, this paper explores how racialized power dynamics impact the relationship between a youth-serving, community-based education nonprofit and its donors. Given the nonprofit’s position between the public and private sectors, this study examines how the organization balances the donors’ interests against public school students’ needs. This paper analyzes the nonprofit’s performance for its private donors and how private donors perform for the nonprofit. Combining Marxist theorist Guy Debord’s society of spectacle with historian Cedric Robinson’s racial capitalism framework illustrates how the nonprofit and its funders perform racialized, classed, and gendered acts. My findings capture these complex power dynamics and the democratic implications of the dynamic between a youth-serving, community-based education nonprofit and private philanthropy.